Seattle

Today we start our second week of our fast and prayer. In 33 days we will be packed and on the road in a 36-foot travel trailer with our 4 kids and hit the road on an epic business and personal adventure around the outer edge of the US.

Today, I (Greg) will be in Seattle. I am representing Xcelerate as a cloud-based accounting firm for churches at the Association of Related Churches (ARC) Meet-Up with Dino Rizzo. In 2003, my wife, Jessica and I, packed up our Toyota Camry with most of our prized belongings and drove out to Seattle from our home in South Carolina to help plant a church with three other young couples. Like many of the church planters we work with now, we were young and ready to storm the gates of hell! It was Seattle that made the way for Xcelerate.

Seattle also holds our first joys of parenthood and held our first-born son Jude. We bought our first home, a 980 square-foot major fixer-upper. I fell in love with the water all around us, and Jessica fell in love with the beautiful flowers from Pike’s Place Market. It was a time when had a fire to use our young marriage to passionately pursue what God called us to. Seattle also holds many losses. Miscarriages took three children before they were able to breathe their first breath. Through infertility our idea of how our family would grow began to change. This is where we first began to open our hearts toward the concept of adoption.

We had already planned to make Seattle one of our stops on the RV trip. We still have many friends there and wanted to show our kids what we our life was like before them. A few months back Jessica began to sense God inviting us to stay in Seattle from Mother’s Day through Father’s Day of 2019. We have some unfinished grief to process and some joys to remember. Seattle holds a lot of joy and pain, so much goodness and so much heartache. Seattle represents when we would say to the enemy, “You will not steal, kill, and destroy” and “God will prevail”. He was out to destroy our church, our finances, our ability to grow our family due to multiple miscarriages and failed foster-to-adopt placements, and our emotions. I know many of you church planters feel the same way - you are on the front lines of the gospel, and the enemy will do all he can to stop families from running to Jesus...especially if that means stopping YOU.

So, we are going to Seattle from the day representing motherhood to the day representing fatherhood as a symbol to the enemy that he has no hold on us. God will prevail!

Pray for me (Greg) today as I meet with 50 or so pastors on the front-lines of ministry. Pray God would show up for our family from Mother’s Day of 2019 to Father’s Day of 2019!